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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24038419">begin anew (walk this path of hope)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/klixxy/pseuds/klixxy'>klixxy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blue Spirit AU, Blue Spirit Zuko (Avatar), Character Study, Depression, Gen, Heavy Angst, How to tag????, Hurt Zuko (Avatar), Oops, Suicide Attempt, Zuko (Avatar) Angst, Zuko (Avatar)-centric, and having an existential crisis, and rambling about sad stuff and life for like 6k words, basically zuko is good boi and has hard life, by channeling myself onto zuko, he's also good boi and is less of an angri boi, he's also the blue spirit, he's also very very sad, honestly this is just me being depressed, it was also supposed to be just 3k, kind of, my hand slipped, now its 6k and i don't know how i got here, seriously someone give zuko a hug</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 15:42:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,812</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24038419</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/klixxy/pseuds/klixxy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“My name is Zuko,” He says, and he knows it’s true, knows that no matter what he thinks, what he wishes, what he does, he is, has always been, and will always be Zuko, that naive, stubborn little <i>child</i> who was left to die by his own father, Zuko, that thirteen-year-old boy who lost everything.</p><p> </p><p>Or, Ozai is somehow an even bigger a**hole than in canon and decided to just abandon Zuko on some Earth Kingdom island in the middle of nowhere for him to die after the Agni Kai. Zuko takes Zuko on a life-changing field trip through the Earth Kingdom! Somehow along the way Zuko almost dies a few times, decides to become the Blue Spirit, and basically has an even more f*cked up life than in canon.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aang &amp; Zuko (Avatar), The Gaang &amp; Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong/Zuko</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1113</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>AtLA <10k fics to read, The Witch's Woods, TheReallyGoodOnes, avatar tingz</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>begin anew (walk this path of hope)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Okayyyyy so this might honestly be the most confusing piece of literature you will ever read (except for like, Crime and Punishment, that book was wayyy too confusing for fourteen-year-old me).</p><p>idk what happened.... I didn't even have a plot in the first place except for like a basic story with like, three plot points, but somehow this one-shot ended up becoming angsty rambling that even I'm having trouble understanding (or maybe that's just 'cause I've been staring at a screen for like ten hours), but all ya gotta know what Zuko has had hard life™ and Ozai is a freakin flaming a**hole, but Zuko still goodboi™, but just the Blue Spirit (and never went through he whole 'i'm going to find and capture the avatar' phase).</p><p>yeahhhhhh</p><p>i hope you like it??? idk???</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Many years later, as he sits before the crackling campfire among the presence of the Avatar <i><strike>(Aang)</strike></i> and his friends, The Blue Spirit <i><strike>(Zuko)</strike></i>, struggling for the words with which to tell these <i>children</i> of his detrimental past, will, unbidden, remember the days in which he had wished for nothing more than death; whether that be by his own hands, or by the hands of his father, the hands of the cruelty that festers in this world. </p><p>The log is rough beneath his legs, poking up at his skin, and the fire occasionally spits sparks of lava towards him- and perhaps at one time he may have flinched away from the heat against the sensitive skin of his face, flinched away from the destruction that takes from so many the most basic and primary rights to happiness, but now he sits still and lets himself be lost within its warmth. </p><p>The Avatar’s face is shrouded in dancing shadows, painted a careful golden orange in the wavering light of the campfire; his grey eyes melted to pools of honey, his arrows hidden by the ink of the night, staring with an unblinking gaze full of a stony something that reminds him, with such force, bleakly of the eyes that he stares into beneath the iron plates of the Fire Nation soldiers’ armor, stealing lives with a wave of their hands, the eyes of his sister, as she burns through the stars, the eyes of his father, as he caresses his face in his memories, gentle, so very gentle, until his palm catches aflame, and his face <i>burns</i> with the scars on his soul. The Avatar looks back at him with eyes that gleam with honey-gold, and he knows those eyes. He sees them in the soldiers, in the flames, in the fear. He sees them in his dreams and in his nightmares and in the mirror as he stares into his own, wretched face.</p><p>But despite everything, as he stares at these faces crowded around the fire, staring at him expectantly, at these faces that he knows the whole fate of the world is depending on, these war-torn faces that rise in the light of the morning just to get up and fight once more- it is with a startling, deep-seated astonishment that he realizes that they are all just <i>children. </i></p><p>The Avatar’s face is still chubby with baby-fat, the earthbender seems barely half his height. None of them realize the true, earthshaking violence of war; the sheer pain and desolation that rips through the hearts of all, but they have all been subjected to a kind of suffering that none but they could ever truly understand. </p><p>They are not children, anymore, and yet, inexplicably, that is all that they ever could possibly be. </p><p>And it is with this revelation that he finds this whole thing harder to do. He’s been fighting and fighting and fighting, and this time he knows he’s fighting for something that might make this world feel fundamentally <i>okay</i> again, regardless of right or wrong, because sometimes it feels like there was never anything right or wrong in the first place, regardless of the fact that he doesn’t even know what constitutes as <i>okay</i> anymore. He’s been fighting and fighting and fighting underneath this mask, underneath this name, because this is who he has become, now, but sitting here, asked to reveal the person behind the mask, he finds that he doesn’t know where to start. He himself does not know anymore- who that person behind the mask is.</p><p>As he reaches back to untie the strings that hold his whole identity together, his mind races with words, and yet it stumbles like a snail, unable to catch any threads of thought, unable to form any starting point from which it may be possible to unravel his story- but where does he start? </p><p>Does he start with that day, in the shop, when he had picked up the mask between his fingers and decided to erase himself? Does he start with <i>that</i> day, when he had stared at the dull knife in his hands and contemplated- Does he start with <b>that</b> one, when he had almost starved to death and realized that the world hated him? Or does he start with that, fateful day, when his father had stared down at his crumpled form as he begged for forgiveness on his knees <i>(foolish, foolish, naive <b>child</b>)</i>, even as his father brought his hands to his face and <i>set it on fire</i>? Does he start with the day when he was born, the day when he first made a flame, the day when his father yelled at him at the dinner table, <i>Azula was born lucky, you were lucky to be born</i>? Does he start with the time his father first brought his fist down upon his skin and beat him black and blue until he was dizzy?</p><p>Was there ever even <i>a start</i> from the start?</p><p>Many years later, as he sits before the crackling campfire with the presence of Aang and his friends accompanying him, Zuko, as he struggles for the words to tell these children of his past, as he reaches back to untie the strings of his mask, he, unbidden, remembers the days in which he wished for nothing more than death, and decides to start with a fact, with something that will not dredge any shattered memories from his mind. </p><p>“I am a firebender.” He says, and carefully brings the mask away from his face. The words are scary; are not words that one can safely say anymore, are not words that carry the pride that he is sure that it had once held, not words that he can justify as anything more than simple, hard, guilty truth.</p><p>The blue wood of his mask is smooth beneath his fingers, worn from everything it’s been through in these years of his life. Without the familiar presence, hiding his face, he feels awfully exposed, and his skin feels sensitive, as the wind stings against the skin of his face. His scar throbs as if he is still that thirteen-year-old child, dumped on the outskirts of some Earth Kingdom coastline, the sickeningly sweet scent of infection sinking through his mind. </p><p>He runs his thumb over the gentle grooves in the carving, over the permanent snarl etched onto the face that he’s begun to think of as his own, and speaks without looking up, speaks as if he is speaking to the mask, weighty but not heavy in his fingers.</p><p>“My name is Zuko,” He says, and he knows it’s true, knows that no matter what he thinks, what he wishes, what he does, he is, has always been, and will always be Zuko, that naive, stubborn little <i>child</i> who was left to die by his own father, Zuko, that thirteen-year-old boy who lost everything. </p><p>He can still remember the absolute pain that had seared through his skin, the darkness in which he’d sank amidst the boiling and distorting wails of his body, of the world around him as it spun and shrunk and grew and disappeared until all that was left was the fresh memory of the fire, shrieking against his face, vaguely registering that he was scrambling on the ground and clawing at his eyes in a desperate attempt to get the flames out, to <i>live</i>, through the raging scream that echoed in his vocal chords, pushed past his lips, and escaped out into the depths of his world.</p><p>“My mother was Lady Ursa, a beautiful and kind woman.” He doesn’t say that she ran away, doesn’t say that it was all his fault, doesn’t tell them about the turtle-ducks or the pond or the sakura tree or that little oasis in the desert of his heart where he’d once allowed the joy to grow- to sing. </p><p>He doesn’t tell them about the rocking motions of the boat as he’d cried to himself in his little abyss of darkness, cried to his father who wasn’t there in a vain attempt to grant himself a single moment of sorrow, of weakness. Doesn’t tell them about being abandoned on some strip of land in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes on his back and the single knife in his boot, with nobody to help him, his face still sinking into his skull, his eye still melting, his nose still pungent with the nauseating stench of infection. He doesn’t tell them about how the world had become a creaky rollercoaster, a broken carousel that had distorted and sunk and turned upside down like it had been nothing more than a cardboard box, with cutout trees and a magazine sun where he’d been thrown away to navigate a world in which he was the only real substance; a dream, if you will- a terrible, crumbling, agonizing dream from which he would never wake again. </p><p>He doesn’t tell them about stumbling through gigantic trees on trembling legs, ignoring the tsunami of pain that wracked his whole body until he was looking at everything through a tunnel which was only getting smaller and smaller and smaller, until it was only a pinprick so very far away, until he wasn’t himself anymore, and there wasn’t anything surrounding him but darkness. Doesn’t tell them about falling to the dirt and seeing more than feeling his body collide with the ground, and writhing in agony for what felt like seconds or hours or days or weeks or centuries. Doesn’t tell them about feeling like the world was crushing his bones to ash, like his skin was stretched too thin over his muscles, like his muscles were no more than thin strands of rice-paper, collapsing under a mere thought. </p><p>He doesn’t tell them about the white-hot fire that had raged and roared in his head like a monster with barbed claws and poisoned fangs and an onslaught of nothing and yet everything that left him... forgetting- himself, where he is, who he is, how to breathe, how to live. Doesn’t tell them about watching the sun come up with unseeing eyes among the ragged chorus of his heaving chest, blinking and then suddenly watching the trees shadowed with the endless black of the night and feeling a pulsating emptiness where his thoughts, his words, his <i>being</i> used to be.</p><p>He doesn’t tell them about the vortex that had opened its mouth and swallowed him whole, doesn’t tell them about how he’d hallucinated and lost himself within thoughts that weren’t really thoughts but images but also just delusions of grandeur. Doesn’t tell them about how he’d felt like the world had nibbled at him and loved the sweet honey that had coated his skin and proceeded to rip into him, only to realize just how bitter and vile he truly tasted on the inside, chewing him up and spitting him right back out into the face of the void, pulling at his hands and his eyes and his soul as it devoured anything he may have ever been.</p><p>He doesn’t tell them anything.</p><p>And perhaps he will tell them; perhaps someday in the inevitable future, if he finds escaping death once again long enough to see an era that is not laden with war, perhaps someday he’ll tell them, sitting comfortably among the rooms of a palace that had once been haunted by his own wails- about all of the monsters that intertwine around his soul, all of the memories that sing a shattered melody in his nightmares.</p><p>But here, sitting among the children who are fated, <i>doomed</i> to either save this world or ruin it, sitting here, sixteen years old with his scars still aching from years and years and <i>years</i> ago, he finds that the words fail him- his courage fails him.</p><p>Instead of telling them about laying there in a pool made of his own suffering- sweat and blood and hunger and tears and <i>infection</i>- instead of admitting to them the memories of waiting for his own death, lying among the shrubbery as just another corpse, just another life wrecked from war, realizing for the first time in his pathetic life just how powerless he was, just how terrifying it felt, submitting to the whims of death, realizing with a tormented feeling of anguish -except it felt so amplified that he could not even begin to describe it as something as simple as <i>anguish</i>, and <i>yet</i>- realizing with such pure agony that his father did not love him, that he had <i>never</i> loved him and that he <i>would never</i> love him. </p><p>It had been a realization that was nothing but hard, painful truth, a realization that hit him truly, only when he had forced himself to his feet before starvation succeeded and carried his life away in its arms- only when he had desperately eaten the grass beneath his feet, the dirt beneath the grass, the bugs crawling on the ground- anything that his addled mind could have identified as resembling something similar to food. It was only when he had finished his panicked consumption, everything he had eaten broiling in his stomach nauseously, that the full weight of his realization had fallen upon him, like the weight of the whole world on his shoulders, the weight of his whole past, as he was finally able to see it, not through the rose-tinted glasses that he had once worn, but through the devastating gaze of reality, as he realized that he would never be granted the one thing he longed for most; the loving acceptance of his father. </p><p>His mind and his body and his heart had finally come together as one entity as it was overcome with pain. He doesn’t remember much of the colossal breakdown that had been culminating for far too long that he’d had in that moment. He doesn’t <i>want</i> to remember. </p><p>But years later, sitting on a log in front of a fire amongst the last rays of hope in the world, all he finds that he can remember of that wretched, pitiful moment is the blazing magma of the tears that had raced down his face like a torrent of unrelenting emotion, the feeling of the messy dirt beneath his skin, the rancid scent of his own vomit upon the forest floor, and the bloodcurdling wails that had ripped the overwhelming sorrow from his heart and shoved it out into the face of Agni and the trees and the silence and the world.</p><p>When he had finally stopped screaming and the ringing sensation left behind only grew louder and louder, he had sat up, alone in a forest he didn’t know, alone in a world that was full of deceit and ash and pain. He had sat up, felt the emptiness hollow in the place of all of the sorrow, the rage, the agony; he had sat up, and he had let the void grip at his bones and drag him to a place of no return, a place where life became something closer to-</p><p>Death.</p><p>His thoughts, his memories, all of it, runs away with him, with the howling emptiness that still roars within his ribcage, but years later, as he sits in front of the fire, his face exposed to the world, his mask a familiar weight in his hands, he doesn’t say any of this, doesn’t reveal anything more than he needs to about the shattered remains of himself.</p><p>Instead, when he opens his mouth to continue speaking, what comes out is not the constant thought of death, heavy in his mind, nor is it the wavering, shadowy vision of his father that haunts him, even in his waking moments.</p><p>Instead, he says, in complete monotone:</p><p>“My father is- <i>was</i> Fire Lord Ozai.” He starts briefly, as if he is speaking of nothing but the weather, as if he hasn’t just spoken earth-shattering news to his now-companions. He ignores the way that they suck in gasps, that Katara’s hands have suddenly drifted towards her water-skin. “And I… I <i>used to be</i> the Crown Prince.” He says, rubbing his fingers against his mask for comfort.</p><p>He looks up again, staring Aang- The Avatar in the eye. </p><p>He is not afraid. </p><p>He is not afraid of death, because it is always on his mind, always drifting somewhere amongst the tangled strings of his thoughts, so much so during these past few years that death has become something almost trivial and yet something so, very crushing. He is not afraid of who he used to be, because now, he knows, he is not that child anymore- no matter how he looks or how old he is or how he still carries part of that naive thirteen-year-old child with him- he is not Zuko anymore, no matter how much people may wonder. He is not afraid of rejection, because either way he will fight against his father, he will become someone better than the man that raised his hand to his own son’s face and set it on fire.</p><p>And Aang must see something within his gaze, steady and strong but also so, very vulnerable because he quiets the outraged murmuring of Katara and Sokka and gestures for him to speak with stormy grey eyes that are too old for his age. </p><p>A small, bitter smile tugs at his lips, and he lets it quirk his mouth up. </p><p>They are children, aren’t they? Just children, fighting a war that has taken more than anybody could ever imagine, a war that kills and burns and taints the innocence of childhood. </p><p>They are just children, and yet here they are, leading the frontal attack against a nation that has killed and killed and killed for a century; the great Avatar is nothing more than a twelve-year-old <i>child. </i></p><p>Not even a teenager. </p><p>And yet, he knows that none of them here are children anymore.</p><p>“I haven’t been ‘Zuko’ in a very long time.” He tells them in the sudden quiet that has descended upon their little camp-group. “I still carry a part him,” He says, closing his eyes to feel the pulse of the fire, to feel its warmth as it pulsates to a beat, almost like a little heart. “That naive, thirteen-year-old boy who chased after nothing but the praise of his father.” He laughs a little, a small, squashed, and distorted thing that sounds more like pain and less like happy.</p><p>“‘Zuko’ was a foolish, foolish child. He thought that perhaps… perhaps his father loved him, perhaps his father <i>could</i> love him if he was good enough.” Bitterness colors his tone black, like the abyss that dances in his head, in his chest. “Now I know that Ozai doesn’t love anybody. He doesn’t love anybody but himself and the twisted sense of power he so craves.” The night is silent, broken only by the diminished crackling of the flames that flicker in their center. A heavy mood permeates the normally upbeat atmosphere. He knows that there was always an undercurrent of this kind of heaviness; a tension that can only come from the threat of violence and war atop the horizon, but now it has been dragged up to the surface, and it feels almost suffocating, but Zuko <i>(is he Zuko anymore?)</i>, The Blue Spirit, welcomes it like an old friend- the familiar, oppressive atmosphere.</p><p>Toph speaks up from her place next to him, her normally loud, exuberant voice quieted by the topic, the thick feeling in the air.</p><p>“Truth.” She affirms, and Aang stares at him with eyes that are far too heavy and a searching pain that aches and aches and aches. The Blue Spirit sits there, mask in hand, feeling raw and torn open, and he is helplessly thrown back into the waves of his memory.</p><p>He remembers it; wandering a land that he didn’t know, his left eye and left ear clouded and tainted in such a way that he knew he would never see or hear out of them again, lost and without purpose, a mindless, lifeless spirit, traveling on weary legs and an empty chest. He was a hollow wooden doll, just a set of bones stacked upon each other in a way that would allow him to move. Those days had been filled with endless contemplation, his thoughts winding in a path that he could never quite follow, drifting through mazes of endless wondering and hopeless vacancy. He had trekked the barren lands of dirt and trees and slipped into a state of glazed existence where his thoughts had swum in circles, around, around, around, his feet moving forwards without command to a destination that even they did not know.</p><p>He had almost starved to death, quite a few times, and some he had not even realized it- the cavernous hunger that threatened to drag his life finally to an end; one moment upright in the dizzying heat and the next facedown in the dirt, his wrists limp and bony. Death had hovered over his shoulder, in those days, as he had meandered without drive from town to town, collapsing on the sides of pathways, vision blurry and hearing muffled, whittled down to nothing but a bag of skin and bones with nothing else, starving and perhaps awaiting the moment where death would appear before him and he could open his arms wide for it to take him away from this miserable existence.</p><p>And yet, time and time again, no matter what happened, he would always wake to the familiar, arduous toil of life, forced to live another day. It was only after the fifth time that he awoke from the unending pull of death and hunger, that he had allowed himself to bring the single knife that owned from the depths of his clothes; his one and only most precious thing.</p><p>There was no purpose to his life anymore; no need to keep breathing and walking and hurting like this. He had been left to die by his own father, burnt and beaten until the fight had finally left his pathetic, broken form. He was already living in a strange state of acrimony- standing but not really standing, breathing but not really breathing, living but not really living because in a sense he knew that he was already dead.</p><p>This was where his story would end.</p><p>Not all stories had happy endings. His had never been happy from the start.</p><p>He unsheathed the knife slowly, carefully, and brought the knife to the skin of his absurdly skinny wrist with his weakened hands, and <i>pressed</i>. The knife had met resistance, but due to the brittle and feeble state of his body, his mind, his shattered perception of self, it cut rather easily despite the trembling in his frail hands, as if his skin was made of water. The crimson tang of iron had filled his nose, and suddenly, he had been reminded of those days, burning with a raging fever in that spot in the forest, the sickly sweet tang of infection the only smell he could register, the pain blazing all throughout his body in an incomprehensible muddle of agony.</p><p>Bile had suddenly pushed up in his throat as the knife dropped from his shaking fingers, but not before his failing eyes had somehow managed to pick up the engraving within the silver.</p><p>
  <i>Never give up without a fight.</i>
</p><p>Red had poured from his bony wrist, soaking through the only pair of clothes he had, through his skin and his arm until it had dripped to the earth and stained it the deepest of red, a puddle of suffering. It was only then, holding onto the last dregs of his sanity, that Zuko had finally felt something well up inside of him instead of the eternal emptiness that had slowly driven him mad. </p><p>
A pointless, faceless rage had welled up inside of him, crashing through his veins in a roar of senseless, righteous fury, at <i>who</i> he wasn’t sure- the world, his father, his mother, his sister, his nation, the Earth Kingdom citizens, the Avatar, <i>himself</i>- but he had been lost within the heightened madness that had only been growing and growing inside of him as he had spent these past few months barely alive, drifting through worlds he would never remember again. The red, his own <i>blood</i>, had poured from his wrist like the anger that he had raged upon the world in that moment, letting all of the hurt and the pain and the injustice and the nightmares of his past spill out of him once more in the form of pure, unadulterated fury.
</p><p>
He had screamed and shrieked and wailed at the sky, words incomprehensible, even to him, because even <i>he</i> had not known what he’d been angry at, even <i>he</i> had not known what vengeful words had cascaded from his lips. He had writhed and shouted and cried and cried and <i>cried</i> from the sheer unfairness of it all, from the tightly wound ball of emotions that was curling in the depths of the void inside of him, that was bleeding him dry, inside out.
</p><p>
And when the black had come to overtake his vision, he'd fought. He fought and fought and fought like a madman because he <i>was</i> a madman, because he’d been hit and hit and <i>hit</i> and thrown to the ground over and over and <i>over</i> again, and he’d had to get up again and again, <i>every single time</i> and he was <i>tired. </i>
</p><p>
He was crazy. 
</p><p>
He’d <i>know</i>n that he’d gone crazy, that life had taken whatever sanity he’d once had and thrown it into a little box before shaking it and shaking it and shaking it until his mind was jumbled and his emotions were out of control.
</p><p>
He was angry.
</p><p>
So, <i>so</i>, very <i>angry.</i>
</p><p>
When the darkness had taken over him, he’d known that he would not get up again.
</p><p>
But, of course, things are never so easy for him. Miraculously, dreadfully, his eyes had opened again.
</p><p>
He had lived.
</p><p>
A woman had found him on the side of the road, bleeding out, and she’d taken him back to her house to heal him. There had been bandages wrapped around his wrist and clean clothes on his skin and the first actual food that he had felt he had ever seen in his life. They had been a kindly Earth Kingdom family, and as he’d forced himself to choke down dinner, the child, Lee, had asked him to show him his knife. When he’d seen the two parents tense, he’d known that they knew just what he’d done with that knife, what he’d tried to do that day as he kneeled in the dirt of some road in some place he didn’t know. 
</p><p>
He’d brushed over the matter easily, and as he’d once again read the inscription upon the knife, he’d felt something bubble up inside of him.
</p><p>

    <i>Never give up without a fight.</i>

</p><p>
He’d stayed with that family for a while, and it was only then that he had understood the severity of the matter. Of what his nation was doing. 
</p><p>
He had seen a lot of the violence and cruelty in his wandering days, but he had never truly taken it in in his state. Everything he had ever been taught had been a lie, everything he had ever known had been flipped on its head and set on fire in the short course of those couple of months. There was a fascinating quality that being close to death had, in the sense that pride and prejudice had all been stripped away to leave only the eyes of reality that showed him the horrors of this world in its true form- in the sense that he had now been exposed to the true, horrible things that his nation, something he’d once believed the best in the world, were doing. They were not saving anybody, heavens no, they were destroying everything. They were taking and burning and murdering- children, elderly, mothers, fathers- lives meant nothing to them, to his father.
</p><p>
It was sickening.
</p><p>
As he’d left the kindly Earth Kingdom family, eyes now wide open to the atrocities committed by his own people, he had, once again, been lost as to what he could do, what he should do, what he should be. As he had continued on his way, with every village he came upon, with every family, every person he spoke to, he was only plagued more and more with the realizations of just how monstrous the Fire Nation had become, just how much fire had been twisted to become something of death and destruction instead of what it truly was, something that had been lost over decades and decades of lies and propaganda. 
</p><p>
Fifteen, young and scarred by his own nation in ways the commonfolk could never even imagine, Zuko had finally had the strength to look upon everything that his father had done, everything his father was doing, and speak in the face of all of the fire; that this was <i>wrong.</i>
</p><p>
That his father, his own <i>father</i>, was a <i>monster.</i>
</p><p>
It was then, fifteen, young, and scarred, already wiser than some people twice his age, that Zuko finally picked himself off of the unforgiving ground, and <i>fought</i> again. 
</p><p>
He had washed dishes and carried boxes of heavy loads, he had scrubbed floors and done laundry. He’d worked like a slave until he’d been able to have the foundation to build himself up into something that was more than a begging, abandoned, starving child refugee on the street, until he’d had the money to be able to <i>do</i> something, whatever that <i>something</i> might entail.
</p><p>
It had been then, as he’d been lost, once again, as to what to do next, that he had seen the blue mask that he now calls a part of himself, hanging on the window of a store in the Earth Kingdom. Something had brought his feet to a halt as he’d stared at the mask on display. Unbidden, he had thought of all those years ago, when he’d been young and unscarred and perhaps maybe even a little bit <i>happy</i>. All those years ago, watching a play next to a mother who loved him, arguing with a little sister with words not filled with contempt but only with mild annoyance and teasing. All those years ago, when his mother had laughed and smiled and patted his head like he was worth something. All those years ago when he had read the lines of the script over and over and over again in the flickering darkness of his room in a shaky voice as the bruises that bloomed purple over his skin throbbed with the pain of the stars.
</p><p>
He’d seen the mask, and everything had flooded back to him; the pain and the hurt and the undeniable <i>sorrow</i>. A deep, pulsating, <i>aching</i> sorrow that he’d known he would carry- a burden of a thousand stars, a burden equal to that of Altas, holding the weight of the world and the sky upon his shoulders- a painful burden he’d known, even as fifteen years old and only just learning how to stand again, that he would carry with him until his inevitable death, whether that be a week from now or a year or a decade or a <i>century.</i>
</p><p>
Before he could have even thought about what he was doing, his feet had led him into the shop until he had picked up the mask in his fingers, the blue wood weighty but not heavy in his hands. He’d run his fingers over the achingly familiar design of the Dark Water Spirit, the scoundrel of the night, the scourge of the Fire Nation.
</p><p>
He could have closed his eyes and almost felt as if he was nine years old again, reciting script lines in the dark of the night, wrapped in his mother’s comforting embrace.
</p><p>
His mother is not here anymore.
</p><p>
But the sound of her voice still lingers within him, despite everything that had happened over these past few years, over the painful memories of his childhood.
</p><p>

    <i>Never forget who you are.</i>

</p><p>
There is a mask from a time in his childhood where perhaps his world had been <i>happy</i> in his hands. There are a pair of dao swords hanging on the wall.
</p><p>
Standing there, holding the mask to his chest, Zuko had thought of who he was. About the Fire Nation and his father and his childhood. About his scar and death and the knife, heavy as iron in his pocket. He thought about this; this chance where maybe, just maybe he could-
</p><p>
Start over.
</p><p>
In that shop so many years ago, Zuko had realized that he wasn’t quite Zuko anymore, that he couldn’t be Zuko anymore.
</p><p>
He was no longer seven, feeding turtle-ducks in a garden where everything could be happy. 
</p><p>
He was no longer ten, lost and mourning a mother who was suddenly gone without a trace, like a ghost.
</p><p>
He was no longer thirteen, kneeling on the hard ground before his father, begging for forgiveness, screaming in pain as his father <i>branded his face.</i>
</p><p>
He was no longer thirteen, abandoned and left to die in a forest.
</p><p>
No longer thirteen, dying and broken and discarded like trash in the middle of nowhere in a country that he doesn’t belong to.
</p><p>
No longer fourteen, miraculously, dreadfully alive, but dead in all the ways that truly matter.
</p><p>
No longer fourteen, bleeding out in the middle of a road he doesn’t know, screaming his pain to the world.
</p><p>
He was no longer Zuko, first son of Ozai and Ursa. No longer Zuko, Crown Prince of the Fire Nation. No longer Zuko, the abandoned and discarded and broken child.
</p><p>
He’d bought the mask and the dao and a set of black clothes, and as he’d stood there, in the light of Agni as it stretched its first rays over the horizon, heart thundering in his ears, he’d slowly lifted the mask to his face, and secured it there, tight around his head. The dao had been a familiar but unfamiliar weight upon his back, and the mask had felt slightly strange upon his face.
</p><p>
But as he’d stood there, a mask on his face and swords that he knew how to use strung across his back, he’d felt something within him struggle to life again, felt that little oasis in the middle of the desolate desert of his heart breathe again for the tiny prickle of joy that had sprouted in the depths of his chest.
</p><p>
He had no longer been Zuko, from that moment. He’d been a clean slate, just another trying man who’d lost everything to the Fire Nation.
</p><p>
He’d breathed.
</p><p>
Once.
</p><p>
Twice.
</p><p>
<i>I am not Zuko</i>, he’d thought.
</p><p>
Three times again.
</p><p>

    <i>I am no longer Zuko.</i>

</p><p>
In that moment, a mask on his face and swords across his back, he’d began anew, once more.
</p><p>
<i>My name is the Blue Spirit.</i><br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.<br/>
.
</p><p>

    <i>And I am a man who will fight, even beyond death.</i>

</p><p>
…
</p><p>
He breaks himself out of his musings as he realizes that he is still sitting around a campfire with the four people the world is counting on to fix it, the four people that have become the world’s only hope. The air is still deathly silent and is quickly bordering on the amount of tense rigidity one would have expected during a high-stake fight.
</p><p>
He huffs out a little sigh, catching the undivided attention of the other teenagers there, before he speaks, slightly exasperated.
</p><p>
“Are you going to kick me out?” He asks them,  and for a long moment, the Avatar Aang just stares back at him across the fire, now dwindled down to a small kindling, the wood glowing with the last embers of the flame. For a moment, Aang flounders, hesitant and unsure of what to answer, his wide grey eyes <i>(a twelve-year-old <b>child</b>)</i> blinking rapidly in response.
</p><p>
“No!” He bursts out, and he flinches at the sudden burst of sound from his own mouth. He steamrolls onwards, however, searching for words along the way. “You- Whoever you may be underneath the mask, you’re-you’re still Blue, right?” He asks into the silence, as Katara and Sokka stare at him as if he is speaking an alien language. He waves his hands awkwardly, his fingers bursting with tension and energy. There a still moment of startled tranquility as everyone stares at the young Avatar as he shrinks in upon himself, embarrassed by his sudden outburst.
</p><p>
Then, Toph snorts, a light, amused sound.
</p><p>
“Isn’t that a bit obvious, Twinkletoes? It’s not like because he’s suddenly the spawn of Firelord asswipe he’s suddenly an evil mastermind.” Her lips scrunch up into her mocking laugh as she sits back and grins up at him as if she doesn’t care at all that he happens to be the son of her most formidable enemy. “He’s still Blue; he admitted it himself that he’s not ‘Zuko’ anymore. He’s still the same guy that’s saved our lives like, no more than twenty times.” She says nonchalantly, her grin wide and filled with trust.
</p><p>
And Zu- <i>Blue</i>. Blue feels his eyes widen a little as he stares at her with thinly veiled confusion. She isn’t scared of him, isn’t instinctively fearful of him just because of the fact that his father just so happens to be the man who wants to burn the world to the ground. 
</p><p>
Because the thing is- Blue doesn’t even trust himself. 
</p><p>
As it stands, his father is still Ozai, no matter what Ozai has said or done or how much he wishes that it wasn’t so. His father is still Ozai- the man who hurt him and burned him and left him to <i>die</i>, and he <i>should</i> hate him, he should <i>hate</i> him so, so, much, should want to <i>kill</i> him and <i>hurt</i> him for everything that he’s done. 
</p><p>
But he doesn’t. 
</p><p>
He <i>can’t.</i>
</p><p>
Because despite everything, Ozai is his father.
</p><p>
Because despite everything, he can’t bring himself to hate this man that hurt him so much.
</p><p>
Yes, he knows that Ozai is in the wrong, that he is cruel and evil and a psychopath who wants to watch the world burn. Yes, he knows that Ozai must be defeated, must be killed and taken down for the sake of the world. Yes, he <i>knows. </i>
</p><p>
He knows all too well.
</p><p>
He resents Ozai. Resents him with all of his being and <i>yet-</i>
</p><p>
And yet he knows that if he had the choice, he wouldn’t be able to kill him.
</p><p>
He’s pathetic.
</p><p>
And yet this girl turns to him, a bounty hunter, a traitor to his own nation, son of the very Firelord himself, and tells him that she <i>trusts</i> him.
</p><p>
As he sits there in stony shocked silence as Katara and Sokka and Aang all slowly start to pitch in, as they start to tell him that he at the very least deserves a chance to prove his trust, as they smile at him and <i>thank</i> him for coming clean, he feels that same feeling he felt a year ago in that shop well up inside of him.
</p><p>
It is light and airy and brings him what feels like <i>joy-</i> and Zuko, <i>Blue</i>, feels-
</p><p>
He <i>feels-</i>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
Alive.
</p><p><br/>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
<i>“Thank you.”</i> He cuts into the mindless chatter of the campfire, and he wonders if they can feel the tears in the rough hoarseness of his voice, if they can feel the- the <i>hope</i> that he’s buried away for so long finally blooming back to life inside of him. 
</p><p>
His fingers shake and his mask clatters to the ground, and there is a sudden wetness gathering beneath his eyelids, a sudden ball stuck in his throat. 
</p><p>
They smile at him, and it’s filled with something so very gentle and so very tender- filled with that something that had danced within his mother’s eyes as she had wrapped him in a hug all those years ago, and Blue-
</p><p>
Blue feels alive, again.
</p><p>
As if he can breathe again, after all this time.
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
He is not Zuko.
</p><p>
But he is not the Blue Spirit either.
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
He is neither, and he doesn’t know who he is, who he <i>wants</i> himself to be, but sitting here amongst people who- who <i>care</i>, he thinks….
</p><p>
He thinks that might be okay.
</p><p>
That this... <i>this</i> might be okay.
</p><p><br/>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
That <i>he</i>, broken and battered and scarred, might be okay.
</p><p><br/>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
The tears slip out, and he is grateful that Aang and Sokka and Katara and Toph <i>(his friends)</i> pretend not to see.
</p><p>
Blue cries.
</p><p>
 He cries, and for what feels like the first time in his entire life, he thinks that maybe....
</p><p>
Maybe everything can turn out okay, in the end.
</p><p>
He thinks that maybe-
</p><p>
Maybe he's finally found a place where he can <i>feel.</i>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p><br/>
</p><p>
Where he can belong.
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>
  <i>”I know now that no one can give you your honor. It’s something you earn for yourself by choosing to do what’s right.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>                                                                       <i>  - Zuko</i></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>I hoped that y'all enjoyed that! By the end I literally did not know what I was typing anymore ;-;</p><p>I'd greatly appreciate it if you could drop down leave a kudos or a comment tho! :)</p><p>oh and guys i finally made a Tumblr for my writing lol. i have no clue what I'm doing 'cause this is my first time using Tumblr but hopefully I'm doing things right??? uhhhhhhh go follow me ig</p><p>https://klixxy.tumblr.com/</p></blockquote></div></div>
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